Tasmania's forest wars

Barking up the wrong tree

EVEN for a leader who has made political combat his hallmark, Tony Abbott’s speech attacking forest conservation was provocative. On March 4th the Australian prime minister told a gathering of forest industry grandees in Canberra that Australia had quite enough national parks, and too much “locked-up forest”. As a first measure, Mr Abbott wants to unlock a swathe of Australia’s most fought-over forest and hand it to loggers. His government has asked UNESCO to remove 74,000 hectares of forest from the World Heritage-listed wilderness region that covers about a fifth of the island state of Tasmania.

Mr Abbott’s speech exploited long-running political divisions over saving Tasmania’s forests. Tasmania (along with South Australia) faces a state election on March 15th. The centre-left Labor Party has governed Tasmania for 16 years; since 2010 it has survived only with parliamentary support from the Tasmanian Greens. Opinion polls suggest that the Liberal Party, a pro-logging soul mate of Mr Abbott’s federal conservative coalition, could unseat Labor.

Mr Abbott flattered his Canberra audience. For too long, he told them, the forest industry had been frowned upon. He saw the loggers not as “environmental bandits”, but as “people who are the ultimate conservationists”. He saved his biggest salvo for the Greens. He linked the “Green ideology” to an unflattering profile of Tasmania: the state with Australia’s lowest growth rate, its highest rate of unemployment and even its lowest life expectancy. Mr Abbott called for the Green ideology to be “expunged” in the election.

For all of this, his real target was a deal known as the Tasmanian Forest Agreement signed two years ago between an unlikely coalition of environmentalists, logging companies and unions. Forests cover about half of Tasmania, compared with 19% for Australia as a whole. Some of Tasmania’s “native” forests have been unlogged for up to a century; a few remain pristine. The agreement was hailed widely for ending 30 years of pitched battles between environmentalists and loggers over access to the forests, and over how much of them should be protected. The battles had harmed the industry: fearing disrupted supplies, customers in Japan, Tasmania’s biggest market for wood chips, had started looking elsewhere, as had other buyers in Asia.

The agreement’s core deal offered certainty on both sides. It guaranteed secure supplies for timber companies which, in return, agreed to shift their sources from native trees to plantation timber; and it protected regions of native timbers with “high conservation value”. A crucial part of the deal involved expanding the World Heritage-listed area that now comprises about 1.5 million hectares of central and south-west Tasmania. The first part of this wilderness region was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1982; it was later expanded three times. A fourth addition, in concert with the forestry deal, took place last year. The 74,000 hectares Mr Abbott now wants excised from World-Heritage protection belongs to this latest addition of about 170,000 hectares.

If he succeeds, there is every chance he could also wreck the peace deal. Peter Gutwein, a state Liberal parliamentarian in Tasmania, calls the deal an “illegitimate agreement struck between big environment, big unions, big industry”. Some who signed up to the deal, though, see it differently. Terry Edwards, head of the Forest Industries Association of Tasmania, an employer body, says the deal was “absolutely imperative” in giving the industry certainty. Japan, especially, had welcomed it. “Everyone was enjoying the relative peace achieved”, he says. Mr Abbott’s talk of World Heritage excisions had worried markets about forest wars breaking out again. “It is a significant risk by the federal government,” says Mr Edwards. “It’s unwarranted and our association doesn’t support it.”

Tasmania’s timber industry currently employs around 4,000 people, about 2,000 fewer than six years ago. Vica Bayley of the Wilderness Society, an environmental lobby group, and another signatory to the agreement, says the deal was partly about protecting timber jobs. Mr Abbott’s tactic to pitch the Liberals as the party to get those jobs back is risky. “Japan is watching this closely”, says Mr Bayley. And if Tasmania again starts logging timber in what is now a World Heritage-listed area? “It could be a killer blow to the industry.”

Have you ever seen these forests? 90m tall eucalypts hundreds of years old. All this logging is to turn them primarily into pulp for toilet paper, as the wood is not useful otherwise. No matter how exalted your opinion of yourself, your hindquarters aren't worth wiping that out.

Even by reactionary politician standards, this is a dire mistake. Here we have AGREEMENT between all "sides" to protect the environment...and the government wants to wreck it? Do we really have to return to chaining ourselves to hundreds-year-old trees?

Especially as the agreement saved some 2000 jobs at the cost of $277m in new pulp mills, or ~$135k per job. What made it really worthwhile was the fact that it required plantation trees as feedstock, not the prime first and second growth forests that "ontime" cares so little about. So the taxpayers footed the bill to save the jobs, and then the gubmint backs out on its end? Difficult to see how that is going to go down without a fight.

The crazy part of this latest environmental vandalism is that the area Abbott wants to log is mainly pristine forest but he has lied to the people telling them it has all been logged before.Only 6000 hectares are regrowth. He also made Biblical references about man having "dominion" over the land etc.and that we could do what we liked with it.The government also put pressure on the Barrier Reef Authority to dredge millions of tons of sediment very close to the reef.This will severely effect water turbidity and the sediment will spread to much of the reef.Dugong need seagrass to survive but seagrass cannot grow well in these conditions.Countries such as Japan and others with strict environmental standards will not buy timber from these areas anyway as they are old growth so it will be of little benefit to log these areas.

You left out:
Q4. Which option will provide jobs fo rth elongest period of time? (The one which ends up with the forest cut down and gone? Or the one which uses the forest without using it up?)
.
But I suppose that all that matters is which will do better for the current election cycle.

The eco folks are a religious organization who firmly believe that the cutting of a tree or the hunting of a animal is a desecration of the earth and a mark of satan that stains mankind...all of this can be replenished, it can be cloned, regrown and made genetically better, mankind is not totally corrupted and morally bankrupt as they believe...

The soon to be elected Tasmanian government has a decision to make ... and, it would appear, this decision will be made on utilitarian grounds not conservation grounds!

The political question for Tasmanian voters, then, is to decide which would be the most profitable way of exploiting these forests? (To delineate most clearly the wide range of choices ...)

(1) an extensive, well advertised tourist industry promoted worldwide by the Tasmanian government?

(2) the building of a world class vertically integrated toilet paper factory to convert said forests into a range of pastel print toilet papers for export worldwide, said forests progressively clear-felled and pulped and processed into said range, the pastel designs being by Tasmanian artists?

Questions.

Q1. Profitable for whom? The state revenue office? The employees? The businesses involved?

Q2. Which gives the most employment to Tasmanians?

Q3. Why is this sort of debate going on at all?

I remember in the early 1970's going on a ten day bus tour across Tasmania, from Port Arthur through Queenstown to the northern coast, and remember being impressed by both the beauty and shocked by the industrial desolation of Queenstown. It saddens me that Australia is about to lose one of its great natural wildernesses to such a crass commercial purpose ...

You are absolutely right they don't. Nor do they belong to a small group of short-termists who would destroy them forever to satisfy a temporary employment opportunity and a venal politician's self-interest.

Most loggers contrary to Abbott ARE bandits. Example -notice on one of the tallest trees in a "protected area" as well as giving the height of the tree also says how much "value" is in timberr of the tree if it logged. The case rests. Neither party gives a damn about conservation, only "jobs", I.e. votes and have compulsory voting and therefore must vote for these clowns (or at least turn up at polling station to have our names ticked offf the list. .

Sadly the religious fervour of faux conservationists ensured rational analysis of how best to conserve the planet's limited resources ceased to be possible long ago.
When emotive blinkers come into play, all they feel necessary is to allege anyone not accepting their creed must be 'evil'
But it enables them to feel 'noble'.

salmtruttafario, while you may redefine words for your personal lexicon, rational discourse requires something more demanding. Good luck if you should decide to engage in the relevant disciplines. Till then, good luck and adios.

salmotruttafario, no one is "absolutely" right; but I will confess to being moderately literate, analytical, and observant, which is why once I moved to Tasmania I soon realised the "Green" movement wasn't what we'd been led to believe.
But I guess it helps people feel "noble"?